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Pompeii on the American Riviera

The Jesusita fire, raging through Santa Barbara, California, has burned nearly three thousand acres and is only ten per cent contained. Fifty-three thousand people—more than half the city’s population—have been ordered or encouraged to evacuate. Schools are closed, performances cancelled. The downtown area, lined with sidewalk cafés and expensive boutiques, is threatened, but not as immediately as some other neighborhoods, whose residents have thronged downtown hotels.

My sister, Satya, lives several blocks from downtown, in a tiny bungalow safely proximate to the ocean. Everyone she knows in the city has either been evacuated or is housing refugees. She falls into the latter camp; her friend Tonya arrived, cat in tow, on Wednesday. When I asked Satya to describe the situation there, she told me that she’s “never been in such a dramatic, apocalyptic scene in my life”—this from someone who lived in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, and spent several months working in a Bogota prison. She went on, in an e-mail sent last night,

I had thoughts of Pompeii just now, looking at an abandoned car dealer’s lot, as ash poured down. Everything was deserted, except for people fleeing towards the freeway. Ash pouring, pouring down, hurting the eyes.

We just snuck back into the evac zones to get more stuff from Tonya’s place. We were safe the whole time, but fire is right over the hill—ALL over the ridge—and this stretch of the city where Tonya lives, where we have sushi and coffee sometimes, is blocked off by cop cars and barriers, utterly black, thousands of homes empty and evacuated. A sky so totally black and ash covered that you’d think there’s a volcano blowing up. It’s still about 100 degrees here and we’re breathing people’s cars and houses right now.

One firefighter called the blaze a “three-headed monster”: it’s moving in three directions at once, and given the wind, its movement is unpredictable. As of yesterday, seventy-five homes were destroyed and thousands more were in danger. No deaths have been reported, though eleven firefighters have been injured. In spite of all this, Satya reports that “spirits are high. I think the whole town is just in awe of what could’ve been, if the emergency crews—all those involved, from city officials to police to firefighters—had not been as prepared and outfitted with resources as they have been.” Such preparedness is the slightly charred silver lining left behind by Santa Barbara’s last major fire, which was extinguished just six months ago.

It remains to be seen what will become of all those dismal cruise vacations, latelyrerouted from Mexico through the “American Riviera” (i.e. Santa Barbara) due to swine-flu concerns. Crisis meets crisis.